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Enlarge ImageRequest to buy this photoPaul Bersebach | The Orange County (Calif.) RegisterDMC-12s to be restored, some as the Back to the Future car, are lined up at the DeLorean Motor Co. in Huntington Beach, Calif.

The 30th anniversary of the classic time-traveling movie
Back to the Future isn’t until 2015, but DeLorean Motor Co. already is seeing a steady
uptick in business for restorations of the stainless-steel cars, complete with flux capacitors,
plutonium gauges and the Mr. Fusion nuclear reactor that enabled the iconic coupe to travel to 1955
— at least on film.

Recently relocated to Huntington Beach, Calif., DeLorean Motor Co. had been making a business
out of simply restoring the beloved, if short-lived, DMC-12 sports car. But increasingly, it’s
fielding requests to transform them into time-traveling replicas for a whole host of events,
including corporate appearances, movie cameos and, next month, the happily married car that will
transport a newlywed couple after their nuptials.

DeLorean mechanic Danny Botkin recently drove his personal
Back to the Future car to San Francisco for an Uber promo, offering free rides through the
popular socially networked ride-sharing service.

“
Back to the Future is getting bigger and bigger, especially among kids who watched the
movie in 1985 and now have enough money to own a piece of it,” said Botkin, who has built six of
the movie-replica cars.

Pull open the gullwing doors and the center console is outfitted with a stack of “time circuits”
that allow passengers to punch in a “destination time” that can transport them decades into the
past or future — at least in the drivers’ minds. Pull a lever and the “flux capacitor” that “makes
time travel possible” using 1.21 gigawatts of electricity, according to the film’s Doc Brown
character, pulses with lights that flash from a box between the headrests.

Botkin, who began work as a mechanic 13 years ago at the now-defunct DeLorean Motor Co.
franchise in Garden Grove, Calif., had purchased a decrepit DMC-12 for $3,000 to restore for
personal use when he was approached by a rep for Universal Studios, who asked if he could restore
the original
Back to the Future car for a possible fourth installment of the film.

“After working on that and getting their car running, it gave me the bug to do mine,” said
Botkin, who took “tons of pictures.”

Those photos have become a handy guideline for the replicas, which cost about $45,000 and source
parts from military surplus, including a jet engine oil cooler and oil separator. The “nuclear
reactor” is a Krups coffee grinder. Its base is a computer hard-drive housing.

“We’ve never advertised that we build these,” Botkin said. “It’s just been a side thing we do.
If people ask us to do it, we’ll do it.”

This DeLorean Motor Co. has nothing to do with the original DeLorean Motor Co. Founded by
General Motors executive John DeLorean in 1975, it went bankrupt in 1982 when it ran into cash-flow
problems after building about 9,000 cars.